Zack Snyder says he sidelined Superman at the end of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice because he wanted Ben Affleck’s Batman to build nascent superhero team the Justice League in the movie’s sequel.

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Snyder’s divisive movie climaxes with the man of steel apparently dead following his battle with the Kryptonian monstrosity Doomsday and a nuclear blast, although ripples of anti-gravity energy from his coffin suggest a resurrection is imminent. The American film-maker said he thought it was important for Superman to take some time out from the story.

“I wanted Bruce Wayne to build the Justice League,” Snyder told Entertainment Weekly. “With Superman around, it’s a different conversation when you create the Justice League, right? It’s like, ‘Me and Superman, we want to make a Justice League.’ … Bruce Wayne having to go out and find these seven samurai by himself, that’s a lot more interesting of a premise.”

Two movies in 2017 and 2018 will see Batman joining Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, Cyborg and others under the Justice League banner. Entertainment Weekly reports the first of these films may follow a “searching for Superman” template, similar to the hunt for lost Jedi knight Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which at least suggests that Kal-El is alive in some form.

“He comes very close to death in space, and the reason we did that is because I wanted to show – and keep the idea in the viewer’s mind – that he can come pretty close to death and the sun can revive him, or he can be revived,” said Snyder, who borrowed the film’s finale from the 1992 comic The Death of Superman. But the director said the last son of Krypton could not simply be revived by sunlight this time, as he was after being hit by a nuclear missile earlier in Batman v Superman.

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“I think something more is gonna need to be done,” said Snyder. “There’s a mythological journey for Superman. There’s the birth, death and resurrection thing. And when you bring him back, who knows what he is when he comes back.”

The film’s box office has been revised down $4m on early estimates from this weekend. Its final global box-office gross at the weekend was $420m (£295m), the best for a superhero movie and the fourth biggest of all time. It had an unexpectedly sharp dip between Friday and Sunday, which may or may not reflect poor reviews and the debate over whether critics have unfairly dismissed the film.

As well as $166m in North America, Batman v Superman had a slightly disappointing $56.5m on its opening weekend in China. It marked Warner Bros’ biggest box office haul over three days in China, yet only the 17th biggest ever in the world’s most populous nation.